Ch. 1. Pre-Christian healing places -- Ch. 2. Christian hospitality: shelters and infirmaries -- Ch. 3. Church and laity: partnership in hospital care -- Ch. 4. Hospitals as segregation and confinement tools: leprosy and plague -- Ch. 5. Enlightenment: medicalization of the hospital -- Ch. 6. Human bodies revealed: hospitals in post revolutionary Paris -- Ch. 7. Modern surgery in hospitals: development of anesthesia and antisepsis

Ch. 8. The limits of medical science: hospitals in Fin-de-Siècle Europe and America -- Ch. 9. Main street's civic pride: the American general hospital as professional workshop -- Ch. 10. Hospitals at the crossroads: government, society, and catholicism in America, 1950-1975 -- Ch. 11. Hospitals as biomedical showcases: academic health centers and organ transplantation -- Ch. 12. Caring for the incurable: AIDS at San Francisco General Hospital -- Conclusion: Towards the next millennium: the future of hospitals as healing spaces.